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This chilling tale of one man’s descent into madness was published shortly before the author was institutionalized for insanity, and so The Horla has inevitably been seen as informed by Guy de Maupassant’s mental illness. While such speculation is murky, it is clear that de Maupassant—hailed alongside Chekhov as father of the short story—was at the peak of his powers in this innovative precursor of first-person psychological fiction.

The most popular and perhaps the greatest of Maupassant's full-length novels, A Woman's Life is the story of the unfortunate Jeanne, a Norman gentlewoman. Avarice and lechery, cruelty and greed, conspire against Jeanne wherever she goes. Maupassant exposes the evil around Jeanne with characteristic detachment and precision, yet his pessimism is, as always, qualified by passages of great lyric beauty, and by the touching sympathy and tenderness with which he portrays his heroine.